April 7, 2011

MIX 2011 will happen next week on April 12 to 14 in Las Vegas. If you look at the picture for the keynote speakers, we have Scott Guthrie, Dean Hachamovitch and Joe Belfiore. So it should be pretty obvious that the sessions will related around Silverlight 5, IE 9 and HTML 5 and Windows Phone 7.
If we look at the detailed agenda, there are sessions on Cloud, there are sessions around Media playback and management, there are sessions on Phone 7 development, there are sessions on MVVM, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery etc. We also do know that Silverlight 5 beta will be announced. There will mostly also be discussions on the recent Phone 7 updates (NoDo and Mango).

There are tons of sessions, but a few interesting sessions, based on my current interests, that I noticed are:

Session on Surface: Surface has been around for a while, but given the niche hardware and horizontal only design, it wasn't as popular as it had the potential to be. With the Surface 2 there is now support for vertical orientation, it runs on Windows 7 and has a new PixelSense technology for its touch support. My expectation is that with version 2, we should see better penetration.

Session on Mono:
I do not recall seeing Mono being talked about much in
public forums like this earlier. Given the late entry of Microsoft in
the smartphone war, this is probably a way to get some leeway by having
deployments possibly on competitor devices. Also read more on this tool from Novell here.

Session on Kinect: Kinect the new XBOX based gaming platform from Microsoft that has awed everyone. With its touchless console and fantastic gesture recognition system, it has become an instant hit. There is also an expectation that the SDK maybe made available during MIX. Watch out for this session also.

April 6, 2011

I had last touched upon Silverlight 5 post the Firestarter event. Since then during various events by Microsoft, HTML 5 has continued to be more prominent and there has been little discussion on Silverlight 5. Even the various web camps conducted across different cities in India focused more on HTML 5.

With Mix 2011 now just around the corner, there is confirmation that Silverlight 5 beta will be made available during the event, which is as per general expectations.